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Facebook employees have been caught leaving glowing reviews on Amazon for Facebook's new video-chat device. Facebook released the Portal, a video-chat and smart-speaker device, in October. It's the first hardware product built and sold under the Facebook brand. The new gadget has already faced some hardship, as Facebook acknowledged that it could collect data about its owners to help the company target ads at people.

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Excerpt - Skype Technologies, the Luxemburg company famous for its free Internet telephone calls, today launches an update that brings us closer to an elusive technological dream — the videophone. The new Skype 2.0 software provides the ability to see as well as hear computer-to-computer callers — provided both parties have webcams. [snip] With the Skype 2.0 update, the picture is far clearer, larger and more stable. So much so, this may be the long-awaited application that brings video telephony to the masses, especially now that webcams can be bought for as little as $30. It doesn't hurt that the...

NEW YORK, Feb 5 (Reuters) - America Online on Thursday said it will let users of its instant messenger service communicate over a live video connection for the first time, months after federal regulators lifted limitations on the company. AOL, the world's largest online service and owned by Time Warner Inc. , also said it will link its live video chat service to Apple Computer Inc.'s iChat service. The deal expands a May 2002 relationship between the two companies that linked their respective messaging services. More than 35 million active users per month send on average 1.5 billion messages...

AOL Preps Live Video IM America Online is poised to unveil the next version of its client software, and which includes an enhancement to its built-in instant messaging that offers streaming videoconferencing. The Dulles, Va.-based Internet giant, a unit of New York media conglomerate Time Warner, plans to launch the next version of its flagship client software, codenamed Tahiti, early into 2004. With that release, the AOL software should include capabilities enabling AOL subscribers to initiate streaming video sessions from within an IM conversation. "We're currently testing it within the beta of the AOL service," said AOL spokesman Derick...